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Hanyang County: the Death of a Widow

Changming Yuan

    Ying was twenty six when her husband died in poverty of an unknown disease. With three children to take care of, she couldn’t have afforded to go with him though she strongly wished to. She knew it would be difficult, if not entirely impossible, to bring them up all by herself. Indeed, with her “lotus-feet” bound since childhood, she couldn’t walk far even without carrying any weight, let alone fetch water from a pond at foothill to irrigate her little patch of farmland, the only estate beside their family house left behind by her father-in-law. But she would never remarry anyone either, as all her husband’s relatives had hoped. She was aware of their conspiracy to kick her out of the village so they could take over her property. Naturally, she would hold her position firmly like a soldier, sticking to her house and crop field, which she was determined to pass on to her only son at any cost.
    She remembered well that before birthing her third child, she and her dying husband had decided to commit family suicide should the baby have turned out to be a daughter again, but fortunately, it was a son, who embodied not only their right to live in the village but their hope for a bright future. Though her husband died a few days later after her delivery, she would uphold her widowhood and make sure her only son could survive, and even thrive.
    The first thing she did was to begin hand-weaving fabric every night after working in the field during the day. Her plan was to sell it to the local shop and use the cash to pay someone to fetch water for her crops. This way, she could grow some grain to prevent her children from starving to death. In the following year, by paying a marriage broker, she sent her eldest daughter away as a child bride to a quite well-to-do family in Wuhan. Several years later, she did the same with her second daughter. In so doing, she was able to give her two daughters a much better life in a big city and, more importantly, concentrate all her effort and money on raising her son. By the time he was eight, she had accumulated enough hard gained money to send him to study at the clan school of the village.
    Growing up in such a poor, helpless but loving single-parent family, Ying’s son turned out to be a really good and devoted boy, who not only did as much farm and household work as he could at home, but distinguished himself as an outstanding pupil at school. Everything seemed to be on the right track when Ying started to feel an unbearable pain in her stomach for unknown reasons, in addition to an increasingly poorer vision she had developed for years because of spinning in a dim corner illuminated by a soy-oil-burning stamp. Each time seeing her sweating with pain and pressing her belly hard with her fist or a thick piece of wood, her little boy was afraid and pleaded with her to go and see a doctor in a town, rather than just go to the nearest temple to say her prayers to Buddha, but she would refuse resolutely, saying that there’s nothing wrong, “just a bit too tired, Son, don’t worry!”
    But as her illness made it hard for her to even walk properly - it was not until decades later that her descendants figured out that she was actually suffering from all bad symptoms of Spinocerbellar Ataxia at the same time ‘ her son became all the more worried. To deal with the rapidly worsening situation, her boy dropped out of school, though he was still too young to be a full-time peasant. Seeing her son have to give up his schooling, which meant nothing less than the hope for their whole family, Ying couldn’t help weeping and wailing over her helplessness. It was then that she decided to spin more fabric day and night even with her increasingly clumsier hands and blurrier eyes. She would earn and save as much money as possible, which she knew her son would need to return to school one day, to get married one day, and to have his own son one day.
    It was in the winter of 1948 when she realized that her loss of mobility signified the end of her usefulness to her dear son, a thin, short and weak boy suffering from malnutrition since infancy. Without a single extra wen of money to see a doctor, she knew she didn’t have many more days to live, and every remaining day would only post an extra burden to her boy. Like every other mother, she longed to see with her own eyes how her only son would grow up into a strong and handsome adult and succeed as an educated man; she could not bear the very idea about how he would stand alone against all hardships in this world once she left him. But after a prolonged hard struggle between mind and heart, she knew that for her son’s sake, she must perforce do something resolute about her own life. So, on a snowy night, after her son fell asleep, she struggled to put beside his pillow all her clothes, which she had alternated to fit him, gazed at him for a long lingering while and then crawled quietly with great difficulty into the water tank in her leaking kitchen. Shivering in cold, she used every trace of her last strength and put her head deep into the tank. Choked with death, she remembered not to disturb her sleeping son by pulling her head out of the water...
    “Remember, that’s how my mom died, without even leaving me a picture of hers,” her son told his sons and grandsons shortly before he contracted Covid-19 and was sent to Vancouver General Hospital right away.

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